I’m tired of having to babysit you.
I still wince remembering those words. As a second-year assistant principal, I was frustrated that a teacher refused to use the foundational literacy program we’d rolled out as a district, and he was upset to see me back in his classroom with a clipboard and a checkbox. I apologized immediately for my comment, and we ended up developing a strong relationship over our next two years together, but the sentiment lingered: My visits felt like surveillance to him and babysitting to me.
The word “fidelity” was listed in Education Week’s top-10 abhorrent buzzwords of 2022 and 2023. Frequent fidelity-checking can leave teachers with a variety of feelings: confusion over what is being assessed, frustration that the intended changes are arbitrary, anger that their professional judgment isn’t respected, or embarrassment over imperfect delivery.
In this biweekly column, principals and other authorities on school leadership—including researchers, education professors, district administrators, and assistant principals—offer timely and timeless advice for their peers.
Last year, my fourth as the principal of a campus with a state-mandated turnaround plan, I needed to ensure classroom instruction was as effective as possible, as quickly as possible. Our kids deserved it, and the state required it. When our campus had rolled out instructional changes in prior years, my office became a confessional as teachers reported their omission of the new curriculum. I don’t have time. I keep forgetting.
Our instructional leadership team needed to support teachers while making critical changes. I’d worked hard to build a supportive, collaborative relationship with my teachers and didn’t want to erode their trust with frequent “gotcha” visits. In a time of high-stakes accountability, can fidelity-checking feel like support instead of surveillance?
Thankfully, with small steps before and during implementation, our team changed teacher perspective on frequent fidelity checks.
1. Name the process and expectations directly.
Your plans for consistent fidelity checks should not be secret. Staff should know exactly when you plan to visit, how you will be collecting data, and what you expect as the visits progress.
Teachers want to do right by their students, and new curriculum or strategies take time to perfect. A stairstep approach to increasing expectations, moving from the basic compliance (i.e., I’m looking to see that you have the new curriculum out and are using it) to effective delivery, can remove stress from teachers who might expect flawlessness too soon.
When rolling out your plans, name the discomfort directly. I found our teachers were more responsive to the metaphor of working with a physical trainer: They could work out on their own, but having someone present to share ideas, offer feedback, and provide that extra nudge could push them to the next level.
2. Ask for your staff’s professional opinion—and make plans to implement it.
A new program rollout can come with a familiar refrain: “This isn’t going to work for my students.” And teachers are often right; they know their students best. Asking teachers to be partners in evaluating a new program respects their professional judgment and limits feelings of micromanagement. It can also improve your long-term outcomes. A Harvard study found student outcomes were the highest when teachers spent the first year of a reading program teaching it as intended before introducing their adaptations the second year.
Before starting our new reading curriculum, we piloted it with two classrooms for six weeks in the spring, taking teacher feedback and adjusting. When we launched in the fall with the full campus, the teachers in the pilot shared their experience and the revisions we’d made based on their notes. Their colleagues were more open knowing the curriculum had already been classroom-tested.
We also asked for our teachers’ commitment to teach the revised material as written for six weeks but requested they annotate the materials with their ideas and concerns. (I wasn’t aware of the Harvard study at the time, or we may have stretched the timeline.) During our fidelity checks, we saw their challenges and collaborated in real time. If one teacher developed something that helped students, we shared it campuswide.
3. Check what matters.
As a teacher and while just starting out as an assistant principal, I experienced observations where suggestions came at me like popcorn: more turn and talks, post the objectives, update the word wall, use a sentence stem. By the time I was a principal, however, I’d learned less really is more.
When determining what you plan to monitor, limit it to one to two areas that will be the most impactful for your students. Align the work to your professional learning and remain consistent with the overall academic messaging. With aligned goals and, ultimately, with increased growth in students’ skills, teachers won’t see the work as arbitrary.
4. Provide teachers time to prepare what you hope to see.
Giving teachers time to prepare for what you hope to see shows them the goal is strengthening their delivery, not compliance. Use your professional learning communities and staff meetings for practicing the lesson delivery or preparing materials. I secured district funding to pay teachers for an hour each week after school to review the week’s texts and plan model responses.
In my school, our implementation wasn’t perfect; some teachers began adapting the curriculum right away while a few struggled to begin at all. Other teachers remained nervous every time we came by their classroom, overthinking their mistakes and expecting perfection. Thankfully, a 2019 study found “that both moderate- and high-fidelity implementation tended to produce positive effects of similar size.” Overall, more teachers were using the curriculum as intended. Teachers even invited me to visit more often to see them in action.
For our team, clarifying expectations, respecting teachers’ professionalism by providing clear pathways for feedback and adaptation, and building teacher buy-in made both veteran and novice teachers more willing to take a chance and to continue on throughout the school year. Within six weeks of launching our new curriculum campuswide and beginning consistent fidelity checks, over 95% of classrooms were using the curriculum as intended, and that rate maintained for the rest of the year. In June, we were able to celebrate our students’ increased state assessment scores—so high that we jumped two accountability ratings and broke the chain of unacceptable performance.
Classroom visits can become a way to strengthen your teacher relationships, a chance to offer feedback and a thumbs-up across the room, with or without your clipboard.
